Toronto band The Beaches are becoming well known to The Current’s audience by virtue of their irresistibly catchy new single, “Blame Brett,” from their album Blame My Ex.

Although many Minnesotans might be learning about The Beaches for the first time this year, the band members already have more than a decade of experience in the music industry. Sisters Kylie and Jordan Miller, along with their friend Eliza Enman-McDaniel, began playing music together while growing up in The Beaches neighborhood along Lake Ontario in east-central Toronto, and they enjoyed some success in the early 2010s as part of a pop-punk outfit Done With Dolls. After a lineup change in Done With Dolls, the Millers and Enman-McDaniel welcomed guitarist Leandra Earl, and in 2013, launched the band named after the neighborhood where the three founding band members grew up. With the name and lineup change came a sonic shift away from pop to an edgier, alt-rock sound.

The Beaches’ first album, Late Show, was released in 2017 and was produced by fellow Torontonians Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw of Metric. In late 2023, The Beaches dropped their second full-length, Blame My Ex. The lead single, “Blame Brett,” was actually inspired by Jordan Miller’s breakup, but ended softly enough that she asked her former boyfriend, Brett Emmons of Canadian rock band The Glorious Sons, if she could use his name in the lyrics. The alliteration just worked so well. “He gave me his consent and his blessing,” Jordan Miller told the CBC in a September 2023 interview.

What’s more, the song isn’t really about Brett; rather, it’s about her own feelings of still processing after a breakup. “It was a really sad and devastating time for me," Jordan Miller said in the same interview with CBC host Tom Power. “There still is a little bit of humour in [Blame Brett] with the chorus, but it is really about me just not being over him.”

Chatting at The Current ahead of their recent session in The Current studio, Jordan Miller joked that she is now waiting for a reciprocal “Blame Jordan” single from Brett Emmons. The Beaches were in town to perform at show at the Fine Line in Minneapolis when they visited The Current studio to perform a three-song acoustic set of music from Blame My Ex. Watch the three-song set in the video player above.

Gallery: The Beaches at The Current

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Songs Performed

00:00:00 Shower Beer
00:03:24 What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Paranoid
00:07:25 Blame Brett

All songs from The Beaches’ 2023 album Blame My Ex, available on AWAL Recordings Ltd. 

Musicians

Jordan Miller – vocals
Kylie Miller  – guitar, backing vocals
Leandra Earl – guitar, backing vocals
Eliza Enman-McDaniel – percussion

Credits

Producer – Derrick Stevens
Video – Eric Xu Romani 
Audio – Evan Clark
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor

External Link

The Beaches – official site